Rogue
by Itzika
Summary: People like Eliot don't become criminals. They would become criminals, because it's what they're good at; but if they were criminals, the law would never catch up to them. So there are people who stop them, change them... use them. Nathan/Eliot
1. Barcode

This story will (there's a 90% certainty at this point) be Nathan/Eliot. If you don't like that, don't get too attached. Possible other pairings, however, are still up in the air.

The title "Rogue" may change.

Feedback is so loved there are no words.

---

Nathan knocked on the door to Eliot's office. Technically, he knew, he owned everything in the offices of "Leverage Accounting," but it didn't hurt anything for him to be polite.

"Yeah, come in."

He turned the knob and opened the door. Eliot had his back to him (incredible change that it made in the potential danger that the man represented), and was dressed only in his pants, the belt of which he appeared to still be fastening. The rest of his clothes were scattered around the office, mostly concentrated around the couch, which had apparently been converted into a bed.

"You stay here last night?" Nate asked, both in surprise and to direct attention away from the actual object of that surprise.

"Yeah," Eliot answered, grabbing his socks and sitting in his office chair to pull them on. "Didn't have a job, and I was around here anyway. That a problem?"

Nate shook his head. "No, I'm just surprised."

Eliot might have laughed; it was hard to tell with him. He turned back to the room, grabbing his shoes and pulling them on, giving Nathan a view of the mark he'd seen before. He had to say something.

"That tattoo…"

Eliot glanced back, rotating his shoulder forward so he could almost make out the numbers under the barcode, as though he'd forgotten it was there. He didn't say anything, though, just looked back to his shoes, letting his hair fall in front of his face.

Nathan closed the door behind him. The doors, like the walls, were soundproof, and Eliot distrusted Alec enough that his computer was in another soundproofed box. It was the only thing Alec could have bugged, so if he couldn't hear through it, he couldn't hear. No one could.

Eliot nodded. "You know them."

"I've had dealings with them." Nate wanted to keep that chapter of his life quiet, but he felt he owed the man in front of him an explanation. "I helped them recapture some of their rogue 'students' before I found out what they were."

"Still are," Eliot corrected sardonically. He'd finished pulling on his shoes, and now he grabbed for a T-shirt, pulling it on quickly as though finally eager to hide the barcode tattoo.

"That's why…" The words died in Nate's throat; they seemed too obvious. Of _course _that was why there was no word on Eliot's whereabouts from age six to age twenty-three; that was obvious. It was too obvious to mention it.

Eliot had finished putting on his shirt. He stood, turning to face Nathan for the first time. It struck Nathan, watching the grace with which the man did just that simple action, just how dangerous Eliot could be if he really wanted to.

"This gonna be a problem?" Eliot asked.

Nathan knew what he meant. "The others don't know," he confirmed, "and they won't find out from me."

Eliot nodded. "Good," he said. Expression returning to normal, he asked, "So, what did you want?"


	2. Puzzle

I kept trying to slip into present tense when I wrote this. I'm 97% sure I got it all back to past tense, but if I missed something, please tell me.

Feedback is love!

---

Sophie was _very_ good at reading people.

She wasn't a good actress—she knew it, when she admitted it to herself—because there was no one to read. So she read _into_ people instead. She was a good con artist because there, she could read people's reactions and emotions. With some degree of accuracy, she could even predict their thoughts and finish their sentences.

So it was very obvious to her that something had happened between Nathan and Eliot. The two of them were the last to the meeting—not unheard of for Eliot; he was a busy little retrieval specialist—but extremely unusual for Nathan. Nathan focused instantly on Alec, but Sophie hadn't missed the conflicting emotions in his eyes as they'd obsessively tracked Eliot's entrance. Eliot, for his part, was tense, nervous, a quality Sophie had never seen in him.

"Start it up," Nathan told Alec, tossing him a CD case.

Alec raised an eyebrow at the disc. "CD? Really?"

"Not mine, not the client's; get on with it." Nathan's voice was tight, strained. It wasn't enough for anyone else to notice, but to Sophie it was as though he'd held a blinking sign over his head saying something was bothering him.

She glanced over at Eliot. The man was watching Alec, eyes wary. Sophie's eyes moved to Alec. He hadn't reacted; he just put the CD into his precious machine and started it up.

"That's a police case file," Sophie said when it showed up. She was surprised. What was Nathan doing with _that?_

"That it is," Nathan agreed. "The convicted is our next client."

"What was she convicted of?" Eliot's voice was steady. No sign he was uneasy, except for the tension that still lined his shoulders.

"Blowing up her school." There was a note of irony in Nathan's voice, but it only exacerbated the unease.

"Cool." Sophie had to smile; she could have predicted that Parker would have that reaction.

Nathan smiled too. Eliot gave one of his all-breath almost-laughs. Parker ignored them, instead asking Nathan, "You don't think she did it?" She was disappointed. Sophie wasn't the only one who noticed.

"At this point, I don't know," Nathan admitted. "What I _do_ know is that the trial was skewed—the prosecution got two pieces of evidence removed that would have provided reasonable doubt. That's what we're concerned with right now."

"What's the evidence she did blow up the school?" If no one else was going to ask, Sophie would.

Nathan nodded reluctantly. "She was in the area, in the room with the bomb until just before it blew; her fingerprints are on what's left of it. She admits to handling the bomb, but according to her, she was trying to deactivate it. She didn't think the cops would get there in time, and she didn't have cell service anyway, so she tried to defuse it on her own.

"The cops have fingerprints, her admission she was in the area, and the smoking gun—" Nathan keyed through several pages to one showing a plastic bag full of blocks of material "—she had more of the explosive from the bomb in her locker."

"I'm going to like this girl," Parker said, grinning.

Nathan continued as though he hadn't heard. "_We _have two things they didn't admit as evidence. First—" he flipped to another page "—is this. It's the biggest piece of the bomb that was left over after the explosion. Anyone recognize the stamp?"

Eliot was the first to speak. "That could belong to at least three different companies."

"But how many of them would have their logo stamped on a bomb?" Sophie asked before Nathan could. He nodded, hands spread in a 'couldn't-have-said-it-better-myself' gesture.

"The Aquarius Corporation." Everyone looked at Parker. Somehow, they couldn't stay surprised that she knew that for long.

Sophie frowned. "A company that makes bombs is named for the water-bearer?" she asked.

"Ever read _The Da Vinci Code?_" Eliot asked. "It's the whole end-of-days thing." Sophie nodded. That made a little more sense.

"The point _is_," Nathan said, "it means the bomb was professionally made."

"And speaking from experience here," Parker cut in, "that means there's no chance in _hell_ that a teenage girl got her hands on it."

"You know, I believe you." Eliot sounded like his old self; whatever had happened, he was much better at dealing with it than Nathan. "Especially the part where you're speaking from experience."

"The second piece of evidence," Nathan said, "is the tapes."

"What?" At least three people asked the question at once, though Sophie wasn't entirely sure if she was asking or just talking along with the others.

"The bomb was set in an off-limits area," Nathan said, pulling up a blueprint of the school. "Every area that's out-of-bounds has security cameras. No one's monitoring them; it just means that they can go back and check what happened if someone does something stupid."

Parker asked, "Are we talking having-sex-and-getting-pregnant stupid, or did they actually set up those cameras in case someone tried to blow up the school?" Her voice was innocent, but her eyes were dancing.

Nathan didn't answer. "But in this case, every tape from the day the bomb went off disappeared."

"So, she took them," Alec suggested. Sophie didn't say anything, just waiting. Nathan was smart; he wouldn't have taken the case if he thought they were being conned again.

She wasn't disappointed. "Let me rephrase. The tapes disappeared _after _our client was in jail and the tapes were in police lockup."

"So someone with access to police lockup took the tapes," Parker said. She looked delighted. Sophie had to agree with her excitement; this one was going to be a challenge. She loved challenges.

Nathan nodded. "Our first priority is to find out what happened. If we determine that Elise is innocent, then we get her released."

"Whoa—Elise?" Alec's eyes had widened; apparently he liked the name. "Who exactly is this girl?" He leaned over to his computer, pulling up a picture of their next client.

Sophie automatically scanned everyone else before she looked at the picture. Nathan looked exasperated at Alec; Alec looked appraising as he viewed the image. Parker didn't have an opinion of a picture, but she was happy to know what her future new best friend looked like; and Eliot—

Eliot had leaned forward, all his attention focused on the picture, frowning and biting his lip as though he was trying to remember something.

Then Sophie looked at the picture.

The girl was fairly normal—green eyes, light skin, messy short-cut hair. She didn't appear to be wearing makeup, but her skin was reddened in a pattern Sophie recognized as a side effect of (usually recently started) _very_ strong acne medication. Whatever the side effects, the medicine was working; her skin was almost perfectly clear.

Her nails were cut short; they didn't even look filed, just cut straight across in a manner Sophie associated with boys and men. She held the sign steady and looked straight into the camera, no smile but at the same time no grimace. Elise Matthews (so the sign read) had taken her booking surprisingly well.

"If you're done checking out our client," Nathan said in a falsely pleasant tone, taking back the tablet, "we have work to do." His voice abruptly became professional. "We need to get the rest of her file—this is just what Elise palmed off her defense attorney. It's probably incomplete."

Sophie glanced at Eliot just in time to see his tongue dart out and lick away the blood where he'd bitten through his lip.

There was something _very_ odd going on around here. Sophie smiled. She always liked a puzzle.


	3. Offer

Title: Offer  
Fandom: Leverage  
Rating: PG-13  
Warnings: brief mild language, implications of evil guys, memories of violence, and oh yeah—getting slashy  
Characters/Pairings: Nathan/Eliot (definitely headed this way now), mentions of OFC client  
Disclaimer: Y'all know I don't own Leverage, right?  
Feedback: Is worth a hundred times its weight in gold.  
Summary: There's a reason Eliot isn't going home.  
Notes: Follows Barcode and Puzzle. And yeah, we're officially headed towards Nathan/Eliot slash. \o/

---

Eliot was reading Kant's _Critiques _for the forty-third time.

He took his time, reading as slowly as he could stand, digesting every word—but it had been less than two hours and he was barely fifty pages from the end of the first.

They'd set up their trip to the precinct. They would get the complete case file tomorrow night. It would be slightly more complicated than a typical case, since there was human, not just machine, validation involved in getting to the file and they had to be sure no one at the precinct knew any of the thieves' faces.

Dammit.

Eliot focused on the words again, trying in vain to block out the invading thoughts. He knew that girl, and considering he'd done such a good job of forgetting where he knew her from, it left a very short list of places he might have met her. He knew the Aquarius Corporation, but he couldn't remember where he'd heard that one either.

Nathan knew. He _knew._

Eliot became abruptly aware that his hand was running over the barcode tattoo. He slammed it down on the chair arm.

The book had declined in importance; Eliot wasn't even looking at the pages now. His mind was… elsewhere. He ducked his head forward, letting his hair hide his face. He didn't like the way he looked. The way they'd trained him to look.

Eliot could swear he smelled blood. He looked at his hand and found that he'd dug four crescent-shaped wounds in his palm with his nails.

He closed his eyes, forcing his mind back to the present. This wasn't _there;_ he was out. Safe. He was never going back. They didn't control him anymore. He didn't have to listen to anyone else, go on what should have been suicide missions for the privilege of staying alive and breathing fresh air; this was his life. He'd created it. It was safe.

But he could remember the feeling of bones breaking in his hands as he slammed the first attacker's arm down over his knee. He could remember that little boy's terror as for the first time, he thrust a thumb tip into the pulse point, hard enough and in just the right spot so that the blood vessel burst.

He was _good_ at what they'd taught him to do. He still did it.

What the hell had he been thinking? He'd practically _shown_ Nate the tattoo. What were the odds that he _wouldn't_ say something?

A hand on his shoulder snapped him back to reality. He turned, standing from the chair and grabbing the hand. Without thinking, he bent the person's wrist into a hold that would make it _very_ painful for them to resist. He lunged forward and was an inch away from delivering a blow that would have snapped the person's neck—

And he stopped.

"Nathan?"

"Yeah." Ford was holding very still. "Mind letting go of my arm? I'd like to be able to use it tomorrow."

Eliot blinked, then remembered what the other was talking about. He let go and stepped back fast, trying to make his body relax from its fighting readiness. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I wondered why you were staying here," Nathan said. Eliot could see that it wasn't the real reason, but he answered anyway. Of course, he lied. He was a thief, after all.

"I was here. Figured I'd just _stay_ here."

Nathan didn't believe him. "Right," he said. Eliot recognized the tone from the talk they'd had at the pool table. It was being turned on him. Irony really sucked sometimes. "Because, being a multimillionaire, you couldn't possibly afford to go to a hotel."

Eliot wanted to look away or duck his head, but that was against the rules of this game. So he smiled.

"Didn't feel like it," he said. "Is there a point to this?"

"Is it because of them?" Nathan seemed to be trying to X-ray Eliot with his eyes. "Are they watching?"

"I just stayed here." The smile vanished. "What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," Nathan said. "Unless you wanted to stay somewhere else."

Eliot frowned. "What?" Nathan couldn't possibly mean what had just jumped into Eliot's mind. Hell, Eliot didn't believe he'd just thought it.

"If they're watching your place…" Nathan looked uncomfortable. Either he'd meant what Eliot thought, or he wanted to be clear that he didn't. "…You could stay at mine. Until it's safe to go back."

Eliot shook his head. "Thanks, but I'm fine here." He smiled again, not quite so empty this time. "You should go home, though. Can't have our fearless leader falling asleep on the job."

Nathan nodded, waved a hasty good-bye, and hurried out the door.


End file.
